I've become an internet meme!

I brought up LinkedIn in my browser this morning and this is what greeted me: a photograph of me taken circa 1978 has ended up in an article on obsolete technology skills. Amused friends and colleagues continue to pass this link on to me. The first to do so worked at that very same computer center at Wright State University when that photograph was taken. That's an IBM 360/65 running OS/MFT in the background, on which I worked as a systems programmer while in college. I dimly recall that it had a whopping 256KB of memory. I am totally rocking that 1970s look.

Engage the Ironic Drive, Mr. Crusher!

Observations on Product Development: Part 4

1. What product your company makes might not be as obvious as you might think.
2. One way to tell what it makes is to look at where your company spends its money.
3. A better way is to look at how your company makes its money.
4. But the best way is to look at what your company produces that would be the most difficult for a competitor to duplicate.
5. You may find that your hardware company is in fact a software company, a service provider, or even a marketing firm.
6. And sometimes the greatest value is not in the product but in the minds of the people producing the product.
7. Some or even most of those people may not actually be employees of your company.

Observations on Product Development: Part 3

1. Your product forms a unified hardware-firmware-software-marketing ecosystem.
2. This is true even if you are only really interested in one part of it.
3. Your product has a lifecycle that extends from conception through decommission.
4. When your product first ships it will be, at best, one-third of the way through its lifecycle.
5. Your product's ecosystem and its lifecycle are orthogonal concerns.
6. You need to control costs in both; otherwise they will eat you alive.
7. Architect, design, implement, and deploy with the entire ecosystem in mind.
8. Architect, design, implement, and deploy with the entire lifecycle in mind.
9. Successful product development organizations don't do this because they are large.
10. They got large because they did this and it allowed them to scale.